Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

Secure attachment has been linked to a child’s ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event.

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone…

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework…

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific…

Trauma can have a masking effect.

It’s very important the toilet be beautiful, that this stage is reflected. If a child suffers trauma, then he will have adult neuroses.

Resiliency is the body’s internal response to a stressful situation.

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity;...

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain...

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community.

I don’t know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff...

…Things happenedwhen you were little. Things youdon’t remember now, and don’t wantto. But they need to escape,need to worm their way outof that dark place in your brainwhere you keep them stashed.

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse.So much worse, Mom said.But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn’t.You did so good, Mom said.Did beautiful, Dad said.

The surgical resident interested in learning trauma will bypass a residency at a quiet community hospital for a residency at a fast-paced Level 1 trauma center treating a high volume of trauma patients. A Level...

I won’t let that night ruin you forever.” But it did, it broke me into a million pieces and blew them away in the wind, like crumbled leaves.

Deep connection is the antidote to madness.

Parts of you are phobic of anger and generally terrified and ashamed of angry dissociative parts. There is often tremendous conflict between anger-avoidant and anger-fixated parts of an individual. Thus, an internal and perpetual cycle...

Rape is so particularly traumatic and so meaningful in so many ways, that there’s something about using the word in other contexts that diminishes the reality of it, and the impact it has on women’s...

Prison left me with some strange little tics.’ She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It’s not that she has anxiety attacks about small...

Lewis’s mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian...

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the...

Trauma is personal.

Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.

i see the sky as beautiful, Regardless of its shine Because I wake each day grateful, That I get another chance to be alive.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

What I wanted was to get away. But the moon was too far beyond, and there were white bits under me, where the flesh was shredded off and the bone gleamed that famed ivory, and...

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

When I ask you who you are, you’d better say my fucking name.

To tell a woman who has suffered through the trauma of rape or an incident of incest and who has been impregnated that she can’t terminate her pregnancy because she has not reported it in...

As a therapist, I have many avenues in which to learn about DID, but I hear exactly the opposite from clients and others who are struggling to understand their own existence. When I talk to...

Shame is internalized when one is abandoned. Abandonment is the precise term to describe how one loses one’s authentic self and ceases to exist psychologically.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but...

The major abscess in the mind is a lack of acknowledgement of evil.

If you have been raped or sexually assaulted and you have been blamed, or fear that you may be blamed, I just want you to understand this: You are not to blame. There is nothing...

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation...

We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories...

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

Shhh…” he repeated. He kissed the top of her head and then stood. With surprising strength, the elderly man lifted her as if she weighed nothing, bringing her to the car. He opened the car...

My sister don’t talk much. When she does, it’s only to me, in moth-winged whispers, and only when we’re alone.

Outside, the sun shines. Inside, there’s only darkness. The blackness is hard to describe, as it’s more than symptoms. It’s a nothing that becomes everything there is. And what one sees is only a fraction...

Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can’t process it because it doesn’t fit with what came before...

I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.

Changes in the Perception of Self:People who have been traumatized in childhood are often troubled by guilt, shame, and negative feelings about themselves, such as the belief they are unlikable, unlovable, stupid, inept, dirty, worthless,...

Caring for others tends to be the first cut when we review our personal time budget. It does not necessarily fulfill the goals of my ambition; it will not pave the way for my success;...

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,’ Miriam says.

BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people...